Prioritized usage control of different shared devices for contention avoidance in optical switching node

Matrix type high-speed optical packet/burst switch is developed that shares high-cost devices for contention avoidance, such as tunable wavelength converters (TWCs) or fiber delay lines (FDLs). In such kind of architectures, there is a technical issue that an overloaded flow causes not only high packet loss probability of itself but also higher packet loss probabilities of other normal flows. We propose the prioritized usage control of shared TWCs and FDLs to solve this issue, and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.